Every so often I like to spend time playing around with new software, to see what I might be missing. Today I got turned on to a couple of cool items.

There is a demo of Qtopia (formerly the Qt Palmtop Environment) available for x86. Qtopia is the primary environment that will run on the Sharp Zaurus, along with a Java VM. I thought the demo was pretty slick--the environment felt very professional and was consistent across apps. Handwriting recognition seems pretty good too. In my opinion, Qtopia seems like a better choice than X11 for a PDA, since there is little need for powerful window handling mechanisms on a quarter-VGA screen.

I also found the ROX filer today. This is a blazing fast GUI file manager. I have tended to stay away from file managers in the past, since I am pretty quick with the command line. I've played with Konqueror, Nautilus, etc., but have been disappointed with startup speed and the time required to render new windows. ROX, on the other hand, is fast enough that I may actually use it regularly.